Is next-8b or Qwen3-4B smaller?

Qwen3-4B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 2.33 GiB against 4.68 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3-4B — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-4B is the smaller download — 2,497,280,256 bytes against 5,027,782,816.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	next-8b	Qwen3-4B	Ratio
4,096	0.56 GiB	0.56 GiB	1.00×
8,192	1.13 GiB	1.13 GiB	1.00×
16,384	2.25 GiB	2.25 GiB	1.00×
32,768	4.50 GiB	4.50 GiB	1.00×
65,536	9.00 GiB	9.00 GiB	1.00×
131,072	18.00 GiB	18.00 GiB	1.00×